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By: Sean Garrity
Posted: July 14, 2017

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TL; DR: In the new era of cloud computing, it’s more important than ever for businesses to make sure their users and data assets are protected from malicious intent. That’s why thousands of organizations worldwide are turning to Cyren for its SaaS security solutions. Cyren offers both faster and more comprehensive internet security through a layered approach leveraging threat intelligence from over 1.3 billion users protected by Cyren services. The scale of Cyren’s network, the world’s largest security cloud, allows it to deliver protection in real time to zero in on and block threats on any device at any location. Cyren’s toolset is comprehensive and reduces the need for businesses to turn to multiple vendors to mitigate different hazards. Because of this, and its ability to immediately identify and allay potential dangers to data and infrastructure, Cyren is saving businesses time and money, and giving its partners the peace of mind that their users and information are safe.

As with many modern businesses, Mayflex, a prominent UK IT products distributor, was faced with the common security challenges that come with our increasingly web-centric world. The company needed to deliver applications to and secure the devices of its almost 300 employees and quickly realized its legacy security solution was not keeping pace with the security demands of the constantly evolving online threat landscape.

Mayflex’s IT team found internet access was being disrupted because of its security appliance outages, and employees, when they could get online, were connecting infected devices to the network. This had the team spending an inordinate amount of valuable time trying to identify and manage problems at a pace that was impossible to maintain. That’s when Mayflex turned to Cyren and its 100% cloud-based security solutions for help.

“Without a doubt, we feel more secure with Cyren in place,” said Martyn Bassett, Mayflex’s Network Support Analyst. “With no reboots required and no service outages anymore, there are fewer interruptions to the business day, so user experiences are much improved.”

After implementing Cyren’s SaaS web and email security solutions, Mayflex was able to protect employees wherever they were connecting their devices, removing the chance of infections entering the network. Internet interruptions were eliminated once Mayflex’s legacy security appliance was replaced, and the time and money the company was losing to security management was swapped for heightened efficiencies and cost savings.

The type of cloud-based security Cyren provides offers several advantages over appliance-based alternatives, as seen in Mayflex’s example. Solutions that live inside the cloud are more capable of protecting systems with much greater agility.

“Security has evolved over the past five to 10 years for a number of reasons,” said Dan Maier, Cyren’s VP of Marketing. “Applications are moving to the cloud and out of the datacenter.”

By leveraging threat intelligence gathered from more than 300 million threats blocked every day, Cyren’s multi-layered approach delivers comprehensive protection that allows businesses to streamline IT operations, safeguard networks and users, and provide visibility into their traffic.

Omnichannel Protection Delivered by the World’s Largest Security Cloud

Because of its advanced capabilities, SaaS-based security is currently the best way to quickly identify and mitigate threats. Dan told us Cyren’s solutions are so effective because they’re grounded massive visibility into web and email traffic and threats as they happen globally.

“Because we have this huge backend cloud, we are able to see threats and stop them more quickly than virtually anybody else in the industry,” Dan said.

While understanding threats post-infection is very important, Cyren’s approach is one of prevention, recognizing suspicious behavior and code beforehand. It’s a multi-layered approach that identifies and mitigates attacks before they reach a user’s device or the corporate network where they can impact operations.

“We stop threats before they get to your users — before they get into your inbox or are downloaded on a browser,” Dan said. “This multi-layered approach is needed — otherwise, it’s impossible to stop every threat from getting into an organization.”

By preemptively safeguarding against threats, Cyren saves businesses time, effort, and money that would otherwise be spent remediating an already infected system.

Cyren’s solutions encompass email and web security, as well as DNS filtering, sandboxing, and cloud application security to ensure protection on every front. With deep security expertise, Cyren uses its own patented detection technologies, such as RPD (Recurrent Pattern Detection) or its new cloud sandbox array, which integrates with both web and email security for an advanced layer of protection against today’s ever-evolving, highly sophisticated malware.

Safeguarding Remote Workforces Against the Evolving Threat Ecosystem

According to Dan, many modern organizations spend unnecessary time and energy managing the hardware boxes on which their security solutions run. These appliances must be constantly patched and updated, are often run from high-power consumption datacenters, and must be installed in a company’s multiple offices and store locations — or traffic must be backhauled to them, adding cost and administrative overhead for IT teams and adding latency to the user experience.

Cyren’s 100% cloud-based security solutions remove the tremendous cost and burden associated with this traditional approach. On-premises appliances, while once sufficient to protect infrastructure, are no longer capable of effectively stopping the multitude of advancing threats.

As remote offices become more common and work happens wherever employees happen to be, employees are essentially out of the traditional security perimeter, and the protection provided by on-premises appliances falls particularly short in safeguarding these mobile users.

“People are working on the road, connecting to open wifi from Starbucks and hotels,” Dan said. “As threats get much more sophisticated, the only way solutions are going to be fast enough and effective enough is by making sure the security is in the cloud.”

Users manually logging into VPNs from workstations in the office must wait for appliance-based security, which is much slower and far more limited. Conversely, the cloud-based malware scanners and filters Cyren operates can be accessed at any time from any authorized device because, in the cloud, security is “always on” and not bound by geographical limitations.

A Layered Approach Offers Comprehensive Web Safety Under One Roof

Cyren’s cloud-based platform allows for a layered and comprehensive means of protection that detects and nullifies threats within seconds.

“The bad guys have gotten smarter and more innovative,” Dan said. “Malware has become more evasive, and phishing has become a huge problem.”

“There’s no way around it — the right way to do security is with a layered approach,” Dan said. “You have to use multiple disparate techniques to cover different types of threats.”

Cyren’s Global View security cloud monitors billions of transactions daily, using techniques such as machine learning and advanced data analytics. By using the cloud sandbox array, Cyren can observe how threats behave in a virtual environment. Multiple sandboxes are used during the analysis to account for differing factors and techniques, allowing the automated system to thoroughly study suspicious files and determine their threat levels. By preventing threats long before they have a chance to infect systems, comprehensive security measures save companies money and headaches associated with reimaging and downtime.

The Future: Shadow IT Discovery to Spot & Block Malicious Cloud Apps

To help companies keep pace with the evolving nature of IT and the threat matrix, Cyren has recently rolled out shadow IT discovery and has made inspection of SSL traffic from HTTPS websites — a growing security gap for most businesses — easy to accomplish.

“We are expanding into cloud application security,” Dan said. “This means protecting organizations when they use cloud apps. While a subset of web security, it has some special requirements.”

IT departments must determine the risk of common cloud-based third-party apps like Dropbox and Evernote. Shadow IT discovery reveals faults in compliance and the use of unapproved apps. Shadow apps potentially expose a business to new threat vectors and data leaks.

“Another area where I am personally very excited is around SSL inspection,” Dan said.

SSL is designed to keep user data secure, yet can still be exploited by savvy hackers, since the encryption guarantees privacy but doesn’t guarantee what is being transmitted is itself safe. In fact, some 37% of malware is covertly delivered over SSL, up significantly in the last two years, according to Dan.

“Only a small percentage of companies have implemented SSL inspection,” he said. “This functionality is very hard to deliver via on-premise appliances, as it requires a lot of CPU cycles.”

Due to these difficulties, the movement to cloud-based SSL inspection makes perfect sense, where massive and highly elastic cloud computing capacity can be brought to bear on the encrypted traffic.

Founded in 1991, Cyren has helped businesses stay secure for more than 25 years. Companies, like Microsoft, and Google, use Cyren technologies to power their security needs. Cyren operates with a mission to stop attacks by eliminating avenues of exposure. And through its new focus on shadow IT discovery and SSL inspection, Cyren shows no signs of slowing its charge to be the “First to detect, first to protect.”

“Our goal is to be the best cloud security company in the world,” Dan said. “I feel like our culture and ideology is a key for getting us there.”

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About the Author

Sean Garrity

Sean Garrity is a Managing Editor at HostingAdvice with more than 10 years of experience researching, writing, and editing for numerous industry-specific trade publications. At HostingAdvice, Sean is charged with orchestrating the site’s content production, overseeing a team of writers, and ensuring the quality of feature and how-to articles. His goal is to keep organizations and entrepreneurs informed on the latest trends and technologies that can help them streamline operations and thrive online. When he isn’t wrapped up in discussions with experts, you can find Sean in front of his monitor, looking for what’s coming next in the fast-changing tech landscape.

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